Evaluation of the course

Thinking back to my first impression about the tools we got to know during this class, like netvibes.com or delicious.com which helped us to create and to organize our personal learning environment, I remember that I was absolutely excited about the new way of acting in the web. My working with the web was pretty amateurish and rather inefficient than it is now after the course. So, all in all, I evaluate the course definitely as very interesting and helpful. The huge number of different and supporting web tools I got to know through this will help me to improve my teaching skills and to motivate my pupils in an appropriate way. I was pretty impressed, how many useful tools in the web are available for free and what possibilities are offered when one gets to know such tools.

Netvibes.com, for example, is one of the tools I liked the most, because it helps me to organize my PLE and offers a great way to combine several web pages and tools and makes it so much easier to keep an appropriate overview. I got the impression that I would not know, how to live without it! ;-)

But I can also remember that sometimes I was rather overwhelmed and frustrated than excited. The huge number of different tools and their way of function were a little bit too much for me. I am really very interested in the new media and I definitely want to use them and to integrate them into my teaching skills but I found it quite frustrating and discouraging to work with some tools, especially when they did not want to do what I expected them to do. Up to the present day, I´m for example still not able to connect the flickr.com-feed of the pictures my group has taken with my netvibes-site.

Other tools are surely very helpful and even though I still have several problems dealing with them, like prezi.com for example, I know that I just have to improve my skills using them and then I will learn to love them like I did with netvibes.com.

One of the best things of this course was the expert talk we had with an English teacher about web tools he uses in his classes and where we got very useful infomation about the reality in classrooms. Here we had the chance to get information from somebody who is really into the field of new media in the foreign language classroom, which also really impressed me but also showed me, how carefully you have to choose between the several possibilities you have in the web. The tool you use always has to match with the group of students you want to work with.
Here you can find the questions we have prepared in class for this talk:
http://titanpad.com/expert-questions

I was pretty impressed what new ways to work and what kind of new tools I was allowed to get to know during this class. This encouraged me in my opinion that a teacher always has to learn and that he always has to train and improve his skills. As much tools I got to know during this course, there are more than a billion, I am sure, that I do not know yet.